The level of service provided by a company to its customers has an increasing effect on the loyalty of customers to the company's products and the value of its brand name. A considerable segment of the interaction of a customer with a company may be through that company's call/contact center. These centers provide services to the customer through customer service representatives, who are the personnel of the centers in direct contact with the customer. The potential impact of this experience on customer loyalty to a company makes it imperative that the service provided by a customer service representative is the best possible and that customer service representatives are familiar with the services and/products of the company, and also with the goals of that company.
During sessions with customers, while conversing on the phone, chatting on the Web and/or through other types of “chat” or instant messaging systems, answering an e-mail message or any other form of communication with the customer, a customer service representative is expected to demonstrate a certain level of service, familiarity with the underlying software systems of the company, courtesy to the customer and various other attributes. The quality of the performance by the customer service representative is therefore quite important, in order to provide high quality customer service and thereby generate customer loyalty. Thus, the accurate assessment of the quality of this performance is quite important.
Certain methodologies for quality measurement (QM) of customer service representative performance on the job have evolved. Most of these methodologies use automatic tools for recording and playback of customer sessions, occasionally with synchronized recording of the activities on the screen or monitor of the computer of the customer service representative during the interaction. Capturing and playback of screen activities enables evaluation of the customer service representative's abilities with regard to operation of software applications used by the company to manage the relevant processes, such as a CRM (customer relations management) system, e-mail message system and so forth. The ability of the customer service representative to properly operate these systems both with regard to the functional aspect (the ability to type quickly and accurately, and the familiarity with the various screens relevant to the task), and also with regard to the ability to accomplish one or more customer-related goals which may occur as a result of an interaction.
Currently, various QM systems conduct recording of screen shots at varying degrees of frequency on the customer service representative's desktop screen. These screen shots are a collection of bitmaps and are either synchronized with applicable telephone interactions or can be viewed stand-alone.
Currently available technologies for attempting to assess the quality of interactions of customer service representatives with the customer have a number of drawbacks. For example, these technologies may cause network congestion, as the type of information transmitted requires excessive use of the network bandwidth and can affect the performance of highly important applications on the network, if a heavy implementation of the software program is used. Furthermore, for those workstations which are connected to the network by a modem or other low bandwidth devices, screen recording is currently not a realistic or practical option.
Another drawback of currently available technologies is their potentially excessive consumption of workstation (computer) resources. Certain of the workstation resources are dedicated to performing the screen recording and may slow down the performance of the workstation for the customer service representative, hence hampering the ability of that representative to perform the work.
In addition, these technologies do not provide actual data, as the screen shots by themselves are not susceptible to automatic analysis and can only be understood by a human supervisor with a high level of familiarity with the subject matter. Such manual analysis of the screenshots is clearly inefficient and time consuming.